


ca, ça va te tuer

by tulipohare



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 08:22:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14828760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tulipohare/pseuds/tulipohare
Summary: Eugene carries a hundred heavy things that are unresolvable and beyond consideration. The three or four of them that slipped out to New Orleans like a thief look kind of petty among the shells and dead.





	ca, ça va te tuer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [funkandwag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/funkandwag/gifts).



> This one was a long time coming
> 
> The title comes from an ancient Cajun/Appalachian fusion song and basically means "That? That'll kill you."

For a while Eugene is lying in pieces and waiting. Perhaps for a postcard, a cream and grey picture of a streetcar, or a once-grand old house. He waits for a long time.

The cottonwoods rain down in March and Gene can feel himself drawing the edges together, gathering his legs and head from the woods and starting to stitch them back up. There wouldn’t be anything to say, anyway. Not now.

Gene carries a hundred heavy things that are unresolvable and beyond consideration. The three or four of them that slipped out to New Orleans like a thief look kind of petty among the shells and dead.

He takes to seeing a girl, Joyce, an artist with a long coil of brown hair that the others whisper about behind their hands. They call her Granny when they think she can’t hear. She wears a red dress with tiny white flecks when Eugene kisses her.

She takes off her shoes and her stockings get muddy when they walk home, and as she’s standing on one leg making a comical face, he leans down and misses her mouth but then finds it. She laughs broad and throaty at him, and screws one of her cigarettes into a smooth wooden holder.

She sketches the men and their ladies down at the river, and Eugene tries to think if this is happy.

Joyce gently leaves him for a steel magnate’s son, a childhood friend who just adores her. She’s going to New York with him, and his mother’s a real harridan. Eugene doesn’t mind, just feels a pinchy kind of fondness.

She puts her large hand softly on his shoulder and says “All right. All right, chum.”

She tells him, “Isn’t it strange to have someone know so much about you and still want you around?”

“You in love?” he asks her.

“Oh yes,” she says.

“What’s that like?”

“Oh Gene, she says, watery eyes and a wide true smile, “it’s just _awful_.”

Eugene wonders if anyone could ever know all one hundred of those heavy things. 

 

He doesn’t mean to go. He’s 25, newly graduated and Beau Taylor says New Orleans and he agrees, swept up in Beau’s expansive self, before it even occurs to him. All the boys are going, one last spring journey before they’re all married and career’d.

Eugene has no idea why they keep him around. He’s not in pieces anymore, no, but he’s never going to be one of the old college crowd. He skirts them, and Beau grabs him by the scruff of his neck and brings him in occasionally. They were 17 when the war ended. They are very young.

He does a lot of the driving, across the flat mud and cotton of Mississippi. When Beau digs his knuckles into Eugene’s shoulder and asks if he’s okay, Eugene doesn’t hear or feel it.

He skips out of the club where the boys are drinking and watching a women in a shining red dress sing and move. He wanders up and down the streets with his hands in his pockets, faintly disappointed, not knowing what he was expecting. There are drunk men, women in heels on corners, a vagrant or two or three.

Eugene imagines, or hallucinates, that a thin film of whatever is in the air in this place has spread itself all over his skin. A brief burst of torrential rain forces him under the awning of a nearby bar, and he has to press his forehead against the brick and take long slow breaths and remind himself where he is.

The bar looks sleepy, well-lit and quiet, and these sheets of rain could drown a man. Thick smoke filling the place, and quiet French sailing out from a record player. They don’t even have a band.

There can’t be more than five of them. Men who look like they’ve done a full day’s hard work, shirt sleeves rolled up, slumped over low glasses of whiskey. Sunburn on necks and wiry muscle visible in the forearms they prop on the table, half in guarded defense, half in weariness.

Eugene huffs softly. He doesn’t know whether it’s a laugh.

The bartender is brushing fifty, a neat man with each thread and hair firmly in place. His rag is folded precisely and placed over his shoulder. Eugene orders a bourbon and sits at the bar, slightly away.

“You serve, boy?” says the bartender, with long soft vowels.

“Yessir,” Eugene says.

“I know,” he says, “I can see it.”

The corner of Eugene’s mouth tugs up, only slightly, and despite himself.

“Where were you?” the man asks, a little warily. Not wild animal wary. Approaching an unknown horse wary.

Eugene hears the echo of his breath in the glass as he drinks.

“I was at Okinawa,” he says, “Peleliu.”

The bartender nods. He leaves Eugene to his drink and goes over to change the record. There’s the thumping skip as the next song begins, the vanilla smell of an unfamiliar cigarette that a stocky man at the other end of the bar is smoking.

“Oh Gene,” Joyce had said, “It’s just _awful_.”

Eugene has sewn his legs back on, and so he can get up and pay the bartender, and ask him: Where’s the VA around here? Oh yeah? When about do you think they’d open?

He finds Beau at the hotel, tells him that a couple of business matters have come up, and he needs to stay here and deal with them. Y’all go on ahead. Beau lifts his eyebrows and playfully punches him in the stomach a couple of times. “Business? Well all right, boy.”

Eugene sleeps a couple of hours, and then stares into a mirror misted by the shower. Street vendors yelling already. It’s morning enough. He puts on a clean shirt and rolls his sleeves up against the heat. He thinks briefly about telegramming his father, asking for a bit of money. To what purpose? Well. He decides against it.

The pelicans land in flocks on the water, and the fog pales into morning.

The address is just a little east, Rampart and Esplanade, then over, you won’t miss it, says the policeman he asks.

Eugene takes a streetcar, then walks the rest of the way. It’s a shabby building. Good bones, but scalloped balconies that look like they’re one nail away from falling. A basket of overflowing red blooms hangs outside a window.

It isn’t fear like he’s known fear. It isn’t close.

He rings twice, short sharp buzzes, then puts his hands in his trouser pockets and waits. The door swings toward him so that he has to jump back a little, an unexpected quirk of design or lack thereof.

Snafu doesn’t look hollow; he doesn’t look dead. He doesn’t have a black eye or a split eyebrow with bright blood peeking through. His wrists are barely twig-like.

“Sledge,” he says.

“Shelton,” Eugene says, swallowing hard.

“Well, come on,” Shelton says, “Come on then.”

Shelton makes coffee and Eugene sits in agony on a small chair in a spotless kitchen. There’s a bed in the corner, neatly made, a small door to a toilet. A wide room, swept.

Shelton takes longer than is necessary with the coffee.

“What you want?” he finally says to the pot in front of him, “You come to talk about the war?”

“No,” Eugene says.

Shelton turns then, looking kind of fierce. “I’m doing fine,” he says, as if Eugene had suggested otherwise, “I’m doing good.”

“I know,” says Eugene, “You look...”

He runs out of words.

Shelton snorts deep, turns back to the coffee

“I got to go to work,” he says, and Eugene sinks.

“Oh. Of course, yes. I’m, sorry.” Eugene drags to his feet and pats himself down like he’s looking for a cigarette. He hasn’t smoked in over a year.

Shelton stops his retreat. “Stay here if you want. I don’t care.”

He tosses it out, like it means nothing.

“You’re tired,” Shelton says. 

 

Shelton smells like sweat when he gets back from work, wherever that is. Eugene’s afraid to ask, or he doesn’t care. Or something.

A good sweat, though, almost like when Gene’s father got back from a wander in the woods. An honorable sweat.

“Let’s go get drunk,” says Eugene.

They go, of course, to the quiet bar with the neat little bartender where Lafitte meets the French Quarter. The record player is floating out music very softly and Shelton closes his eyes and hums and hums.

It’s easier drunk. What isn’t?

On the streetcar back to Shelton’s place Eugene nearly falls on his ass before a hand catches the back of shirt and pulls him back.

“Here,” Shelton says, and pushes him to a pole, “Hang on.”

Eugene swings from the pole. Everything is swinging.

“Shouldn’t be here, you know,” Shelton says. He sounds teasing, almost. Eugene opens his mouth but only manages to yawn.

“You know what I am,” Shelton says, “Don’t need any-a this.”

“Sick of you telling me what I can’t do,” Eugene says.

“Not going to let me keep you out of hell?” Shelton says. He must think Eugene isn’t listening. “Cracker-ass.”

“I’m not clean,” Eugene growls at him, “Or whatever it is you--” He’s burning angry and nigh-on sick, and at their stop, he stumbles off the car and falls into a bush.

“Jesus, Sledge,” Shelton says “You sure ain’t now.”

He helps Eugene up, brushes a palmetto bug off of the front of Eugene’s shirt, and then his hand stays, and twists in the fabric. He’s got chimney swallow hands.

“Sorry,” Eugene says, “I’m sorry. I’m--common error. Swift, actually... _chaetura pelagica_.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shelton says, and he’s laughing light, but grips hard at Eugene’s shirt.

He puts his other hand on Eugene’s back so he doesn’t fall on the way up the stairs, back to his tidy room.

Shelton tosses Gene into his bathtub, clothes and all, and turns on the water.

“Dry out,” he says.

Cold water pricks. Eugene had forgotten how hard it could be. Nothing around here is cold. Where’d Shelton get this cold hard water?

It’s near midnight and he’s in Snafu’s bathtub in New Orleans. With that thought comes a horrid moment where his heart -- so many years reliable now -- skips, and skips, and then resumes. A punishment maybe? A push? He gasps.

“C’mere” Gene says.

“Naw,” Shelton says, and goes to the sink to bend his head and drink from the tap. Water trickles from the corner of his mouth, down to his collar, and curls the hairs on the nape of his neck.

“ _Fuck_ you,” Eugene says. Shelton backs away a little and slouches in the doorway of the tiny WC. He watches impassively as Eugene struggles to get his sodden shirt off. It’s weighing him down and he’s gotta be ready. Just in case. He’s finally free and crouches in the tub, half naked and snarling.

“Fuck you, Snafu,” he says, “I been to hell.” Eugene tries to find something to clutch at, to pull himself up, but his hands slip on the rim of the tub, impotent. He falls back. He crumples, and he weeps.

“I been to hell. I been _in_ hell.”

Shelton eyes the ground and hunches. Feeling wretched, maybe. Feeling something, because when Eugene begins to hide his face in his hands, he opens the little cupboard above the toilet and grabs a couple of towels, and comes for him.

He helps Gene climb out, precarious and nearly collapsing more than once. Shelton gives him all three of the towels and turns his back when Gene peels the rest of his clothes off. He wraps Gene up in the thin cloth, scrubs one of them over his head until red tufts stick straight up.

Shelton tosses wet clothes over the window sill to dry, and shakes his head, not meeting Eugene’s eyes. Gene’s a kid again, shivering at the edge of the swimming hole as his mother packs up the generous icebox and tells them to head on home. He’s pulling terrycloth around his shoulders. He’d managed almost the full length of the water before his heart seized and Momma pulled him out.

“I’m sorry,” Eugene says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“What the fuck you have to be sorry for?” Shelton says.

Gene can’t stop. He crowds him, pushing forward. No, he’s lunging forward, and Snafu stops him, dipping his head, knocking their skulls together. He keeps close, though, moves a little, a strange gentle tossing of their foreheads together. Like two calves nosing at each other.

“Naw,” Shelton says, low, and presses his open mouth directly over Eugene’s. It’s the opposite of the hard cold water of a bathtub or a swimming hole or the rain pouring down on endless rocks all the way across the world. This is an unfurling heat in Eugene’s chest and an inexplicably painful blush in his toes. He’s dripping all over the linoleum.

“What,” says Shelton, as they break apart to breathe. “What you want, Sledge?”

Eugene says, “Stay.”

“This is my room, asshole,” says Shelton, and bites down on Eugene’s lip, soft.

“You know what I mean, you know exactly what I mean,” says Eugene, and he tangles his hand into Shelton’s and does not loosen his grip when Shelton steers him to the bed. He doesn’t let go when they curl, back to front, on the narrow bed. As soon as Gene starts to dry he's all sweat-damp again.

He tenses suddenly, waiting for the sound of a shell, but there’s just breathing. Breathing and a long bumpy spine pressed close into his chest. There’s only a hand in his, that he clutches so hard it pops and cracks a little. He’s crushed a chimney swift in his palm. He didn’t mean to.

They sleep the drunkard’s sleep, but even so, Snafu grinds his teeth. He will forever; Gene is sure.

 

When Eugene wakes, Shelton is still there, breathing easy, head completely off the pillow. Gene must’ve pushed him in the night.

Gene’s let the bird go, and now his hand curls against Shelton’s stomach, soft and consistently fed. Shelton smells ripe, and Eugene trails tentative fingers below, to a jutting hip bone. Fear and fire in his veins. But look where they are. Maybe one or two heavy, heavy things stole back onto the train and lay before him.

Gene strokes tiny circles into what his textbooks call the inguinal canal, and Shelton lets something creaky escape from his lips.

He tries again, “Well, come on then Sledge.”

“I-- don’t know what to do.” Gene cringes, bites his tongue hard, tastes tin.

“What you think, college boy?” Shelton says, rumbling, and Gene dips his hand down into white cotton shorts and feels the first brush of heat, and then fierce hardness. Gene, he does his best, and he can’t help but press forward as he covers his hand in spit. Shelton hisses at the contact. Sounds like he did way back, like his self-abuse in the hole they dug together, in the lulls of combat when there wasn’t anything else to do that felt remotely good. When Gene ignored it, and was ignored in turn. Because what else did they have?

He doesn’t want to give a rough touch. He’d do just about anything to avoid that.

Later Shelton pulls away. The sound of running water, scrubbing soap. The gathering of a few small items that he dumps on the bed

“I want something,” he says “ ‘fore you go.”

Gene picks up the small jar of jelly. World Famous Vaseline. Trade Mark.

“I don’t mean to go,” he says, talking to the red label.

Shelton makes no sign he’s even heard, and crawls back into bed.

“Here,” he says, chimney swift hands moving.

“Won’t it hurt?” Gene says.

“Little.”

When Gene is inside him, surrounded by him, when it feels like he’s lost all his limbs again, spread across the solar system, he takes his mouth off of Shelton’s neck and says “I dreamed of you.”

And Shelton shakes, and grunts, “Dreamed about you. In a quiet place. A good place.”

Eugene holds him, and he holds him, and he says, very soft, “Yeah.”

It’s just awful.

 

 

Weeks later, or months, maybe a year, Eugene closes up his attaché case full of student papers and catches the Tulane to Marigny.

He beats Shelton home, but waits so the two of them can take turns chipping ice off of the new block. Only fair. They sit together with tall glasses. The windows are open but the curtains closed and they only barely flutter. No one says _remember_ ; they’re thinking about supper.

“What you want, Sledge?” Shelton says, tapping into an ashtray at his elbow.

“A houseboat?” Eugene says, “I don’t know.”

Shelton grunts--or laughs, still hard to tell--and tosses a chunk of ice at Gene’s head. It slips down into his collar and stings, and then it’s nothing at all. It’s gone.

“I was going to work the lumber yards forever you know,” Shelton says, “get married, have a son.”

“Sorry,” Gene says.

“No you are not,” Shelton says, but smiles, small and secret, around his cigarette.

Eugene reaches over, angling for a drag, but Shelton knocks his hand away.

“Your heart,” he says.


End file.
